Happy New Year’s Eve!

Should old acquaintance be forgot…

And what are the rest of the words?

Are you going out tonight?

I always thought I’d grow up and dance like my mom at the Elks a la ’60s.

I don’t have a party dress.

So I am cooking a delicious home-cooked dinner, baked chicken with garlic and apples (Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking).

And we are writing our “Best of 2012” lists.

Here are my Lucky Eleven Best New Books of 2012, and I’ve added a couple of Special Categories for other older books.

I unwittingly included two rock and roll novels and one jazz novel on my list.  I’m not sure how that happened.

And after MY list, I am including my husband’s Top 5!  So enjoy our lists!

Top 11 New Books of 2012 (All Published This Century)

1.  Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, a superb novel about a used record store in Oakland faced with the prospect of a corporate media store moving in.

2.  Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch, a retelling of Antigone set in the war in Afghanistan.

3.  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s A Lovesong for India:  Stories from East and West.  This stunning short story collection is divided into three parts, “India,” “Mostly Arts and Entertainment,” and “The Last Decades,” and is set in India and the U.S.  Jhabvala  won the Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust and two Academy Awards for best adapted screenplay for Merchant-Ivory films, A Room with a View andHowards End.   Isn’t it time she won an American award?

4.  The Night Train by Clyde Edgerton, a charming, humorous novel inspired by James Brown, Civil Rights, and the ’60s.  Edgerton describes a friendship between an African-American boy and a white boy in a small Southern  town.

5.  A. M. Homes’s May We Be Forgiven.  A brilliant, horrific, often funny satire of the American Dream.  Family prevails, but it is threatened by violence and trauma.  Were the Nixon years, bad as they were, more idealistic than the 21st century?  The main character is a “Nixonologist.”

6.  Scarlett Thomas’s enchanting novel, Our Tragic Universe, crackles with wit.   The narrator, Meg, is a waifish, depressed science fiction writer who is in love with a married museum director, has a psychic dog, B, and a close friend, Libby, a deli owner and inspired knitter whose life is equally complicated.  I loved this and must read another Thomas novel soon.

7.  Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked, his best novel.  The heroine, Annie,breaks up with her boyfriend of 15 years, Duncan, a middle-aged man obsessed with Tucker Crowe, a rock star who retired in 1984.   Their interests are oddly parallel:  she curates the town museum, he curates a Tucker Crowe website.  But she wants a child, and knows she will never have one with Duncan.   A disagreement about Tucker Crowe’s new record, “Juliet, Naked,” on the website eventually sparks a friendship between Annie and Tucker.  Kind of romantic, but not too-too.

8.  Zadie Smith’s NW.  Four characters from the same rough neighborhood in London (NW) manage to transcend class, or fall way, way down.  Sad and funny.  A lot about the internet culture.  I didn’t love this book, but it is very good.

9.  Alice Kessler-Harris’s A Difficult Woman:  The Challenging Lives and Times of Lillian Hellman.  A brilliant biography of Hellman, who was one of our best American writers, but has been denied her place in the canon because of accusations of lying, her politics, and her attacks of  leftists for their cowardice during the McCarthy era.

10.  Howard Jacobson’s Zoo Time, a satire of the publishing industry.  He is one of England’s most brilliant writers, and he is very funny.

11.  Will Self’s Umbrella.  Excellent Joycean novel, which I am rereading in 2013, and let me know if anyone is “sponsoring” a read of this.  A psychiatrist discovers that some of his patients were actually victims of an encephalitis lethargica epidemic.  Very sad, and I have to admit I was initially interested because of its relevance to my life:  I was hospitalized for a bug bite and almost died, and encephalitis was one of the illnesses they ruled out (though not this strain).

AND SPECIAL CATEGORIES OF OTHER BOOKS

BEST TRANSLATION

Lydia Davis’ translation of Madame Bovary

BEST OUT-OF-PRINT BOOK

Dear Beast by Nancy Hale.  A more “grown-up” American version of D. E. Stevenson’s Miss Buncle’s Book.  A woman’s novel about the small Southern town where she lives becomes a best-seller.

BEST NEGLECTED NOVEL

Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins.  Won the Pulitzer:  an excellent novel about pioneer farmers in Iowa.

AND NOW FOR AN UNPRECEDENTED ADDITION.  MY HUSBAND HAS AGREED TO LET ME PUBLISH HIS TOP 5 LIST:

Melville: One of “His” Favorites

1. The Passage of H.M. by Jay Parini – I would recommend this book to anyone. Dickens is a character in this book!

2. One of Ours by Willa Cather. One of the saddest books I have ever read.

3. Zeitoun by Dave Eggars.  I don’t know how this guy does it. A great and shocking story about the Katrina disaster.

4. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. I listened to this book driving to Buffalo. It was great. They interviewed him on the last disk. He said he was inspired to invent this story when he came across the book “Teach yourself Yiddish” in a used bookstore.

5. The Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing. I enjoyed all the Lessing books that I read, but this one was the best. I will read more of her.

Other very good reads: As I Lay Dying, Moby Dick, Big Breasts and Wide Hips (still reading).

Not a bad year at all.

See you next year!